 Thursday, February 5, 2004
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Moving piece in the Washington Post about the plight of North Korea:
...it will surely turn out that quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. It will turn out that information collected by various human rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists and spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture of an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were things that could have been done, approaches the South Korean government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have applied.
Historians in Asia, Europe and here will finger various institutions, just as we do now, and demand they justify their past actions. And no one will be able to understand how it was possible that we knew of the existence of the gas chambers but failed to act.
I'm reminded of the words of the crusading human-rights activist Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who, having spent time with Doctors Without Borders in North Korea, came back and annoyed the appeasement-oriented South Korean regime:
"Someday, when Korea is united, and all of these facts come to light, like in Germany, I'm sure that the names of the South's pro-North Koreans will be publicized," he said.
History will remember: read more about Vollertsen here, and the BBC documentary which inspired the Washington Post article here. And don't miss the Free North Korea site, and, of course, the Marmot.
And finally, what we may have to do.
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Interesting editorial in eWeek by Jason Brooks today describing the debate surrounding the importance of the operating system:
The irrelevance of the OS was the topic of a recent conversation I had with Rob High, chief architect for IBM's WebSphere product family. IBM is asserting that middleware is evolving into a sort of postmodern OS that's superseding the client OS layer to deliver us our application needs over the network.
Brooks rightly doesn't agree, but comes to the wrong conclusion:
In the face of dominance by a single vendor, it's important to strive for diversity in operating systems˜with standards, not a single vendor, being the common denominator.
That's just dead wrong. It assumes that innovation in the platform is over, that operating system functionality is frozen, well-understood, and standardized - like a BIOS.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Microsoft Longhorn introduces all sorts of innovations -- a schematized, database-like file system called WinFS, a declarative rendering model called Avalon, and open standards-compliant Web Services messaging, codenamed Indigo. These will enable dramatically new and powerful applications. And that's the goal, to enable the best applications, to make people more productive, not provide a lowest (the word that Brooks omitted) common denominator.
Now it's long been my position that the open source community never could innovate on this scale; they are followers, not leaders. Witness the legion attempts to copy Windows user interfaces, and to reverse-engineer Windows functionality.
As far as I can see, only Microsoft and Apple are truly innovating in the OS space, and it shows in the applications they enable.
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This forthcoming article from David Weinberger (via Pito) certainly looks interesting:
Thanks to the constellation of technology that enables digital networks to be laid over the places of the earth, wherever we are we will be able to hear the human conversation that has occurred about that place - the history that occurred there, the aesthetics to be savored, the commerce transpiring at that very moment, recommendations offered by strangers and friends.
Actually, it's rather thought-provoking to consider the dimensionality of semantics. Place is certainly one such dimension, as is time, person, idea, and so on. Indeed, it's interesting to think about a coordinate system for knowledge...but I wonder if all this doesn't bring us back to the good old Dewey Decimal System!
Anyway, I'll look forward to the full article.
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Check this out, tapping into X10 and 2.4GHz security cameras:
Striding through San Francisco's busy financial district after dusk, 20-year-old Jake Appelbaum is an odd sight. His left hand is clutching the handle of a two-foot-long fiberglass pole wrapped in a metal spiral, which he holds high like a lance. The device is a directional antenna: a thin cable hangs between it and what looks like a handheld TV in Appelbaum's other hand....
...at the corner of Mason and Post a clear black-and-white image flickers onto the 2.5 inch screen. It's the interior of an office: a clock and a piece of art can be seen above a desk cluttered with stacks of books. The view is angled sidewise and up towards a drop ceiling, and is partly obscured, giving the video feed a decidedly covert look. Watching the display, Appelbaum sweeps the antenna slowly, left to right, up and down, dowsing for the source of the signal, which seems to be emanating from an upper floor of a hotel. "That's a hidden camera right there," he says, with perhaps more confidence than is due.
Life really is a reality show. (Wasn't there a movie about this a while back?)
(Via SAP Ventures.)
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Yes, I'm a geek. And on that subject Volker has a very funny pair of articles here and here.
(Thanks Wolfgang!)
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Jan Mar
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